We now run training courses on ‘Metacognition across the curriculum’ and ‘Self-regulation across the curriculum’. To enquire about either of these courses, click ‘contact form’ on the right hand side of this page.

As is customary, this blogpost was inspired by a discussion I had on Twitter the other day. The thread is here if you’re interested, but in short the question “What’s the point of P4C” was posed, and I replied “I don’t think I could fit my reply into a hundred tweets”. Well, it doesn’t quite meet the 14000 characters mark, but here is my answer.

What is P4C?

In case you aren’t familiar with the approach, here’s a quick potted history. There are essentially two ways in which one can learn philosophy: a) to study what philosophers have written (philosophy as a noun: a canon of texts to be consumed and understood); and b) to ask philosophical questions, and then discuss them at length (philosophy as a verb: a set of processes to be followed, modelled and learned). Obviously these things are not mutually exclusive, but fundamentally P4C is about the latter: philosophy as a verb.

The approach was developed in the 1970s by Matthew Lipman, a professor from Columbia University who became increasingly frustrated at the lack of critical thinking skills evident in his Philosophy undergrads. Lipman figured you need to start young, and he came up with a methodology for teaching children how to think and reason for themselves; in short, circle time lessons focused on the development of critical thinking skills. He also wrote a series of short novels to introduce children to a series of philosophical conundrums, and to model the kinds of critical thinking that children would then go on to develop for themselves. These texts were read together as a class, and used as a stimulus for class discussions.

Over the years, the approach has evolved and Lipman’s books are not widely used as the stimulus for discussions these days, mainly because they are out of print and second hand copies are eye-wateringly expensive. But the aim of the approach remains the same; for Lipman, it was “not to turn children into philosophers or decision makers, but to help them become more thoughtful, more reflective, more considerate, and more reasonable individuals. Children who have been helped to become more judicious not only have a better sense of when to act but also of when not to act” (Lipman, 1980, p.15).

My journey through P4C

About 10 years ago I attended a Gifted and Talented conference where there were two talks about P4C – one by a classically trained philosopher who had become passionate advocate and practitioner of the approach, and one by a primary headteacher who was even more zealous in his advocacy of the approach. At the end of the morning, I scored a note to self into my pad in large letters:

“YOU HAVE TO GET TRAINED IN P4C!!!”

As is so often the case with training courses, when I returned to work the next day I promptly forgot everything I’d heard, until I stumbled across my notes a year or so later. I arranged for a training session to take place in my hometown, and my love affair with P4C spluttered into life.

I was trained by SAPERE, an organisation that trains teachers in how to run philosophical enquiries as a sequence of stages that you go through in the course of a lesson. I won’t go into it now, but there’s a nice summary of the lesson structure here. Before long, I came to view this structure as just one way of running a philosophical enquiry, and a fairly rigid one at that. I soon adapted the approach in a number of ways, and I am now much more flexible in how I run philosophical enquiry sessions. However I still regularly use P4C in my practice, and I also provide training for others in a flexible approach to philosophical enquiry.

So, what is the point of philosophical enquiry?

What does research tell us?

There has been quite a bit of research into the impact of philosophical enquiry in schools. A randomised, controlled study from Scotland reported that 16 months of weekly philosophical enquiry sessions “led not only to significant gains in measured verbal cognitive ability but also generalization to non-verbal and quantitative reasoning ability, consistent across schools and largely irrespective of pupil gender and ability” (Topping & Trickey, 2007a). This study also reported that “the highest quartile of pre-test ability showed the smallest gains” – in other words, the attainment gap closed – and that “controls did not gain in any aspect”. Furthermore, in a follow-up study two years later – once the students had progressed on to secondary school – the researchers found that the significant cognitive ability gains in the P4C group were maintained when they were retested two years later, while “the control group showed an insignificant but persistent deterioration in scores” (Topping & Trickey, 2007b). The researchers concluded that “given the pattern of sample attrition, the group difference seems likely to be underestimated. The study provides evidence of maintained cognitive gains from collaborative philosophical inquiry, transferred across contexts.”

A recent randomised controlled trial conducted by the EEF also reported that P4C led to gains in reading and maths (Gorard et al, 2015), although this was not the most robust study and alternative interpretations of the data are possible (despite randomisation, the P4C group had far lower prior attainment than the control group).

Some people question the very concept here – why should philosophical enquiry help boost maths scores? But the cognitive gains in verbal, non-verbal and quantitative reasoning suggest a possible mechanism for such ‘far transfer’, since cognitive attainments test scores are widely accepted to be a powerful predictor of subsequent academic success. If philosophical enquiry helps children learn to think and reason more clearly in ways that are detectable using cognitive attainment tests, then it’s not too big a stretch to expect these gains to then translate maths or reading.

Philosophical enquiry has also formed a central part of my own Masters and Doctoral research. My Masters dissertation looked at philosophical enquiry as an approach to teaching PSHCE, while my PhD – a 5-year evaluation of a complex Learning to Learn intervention, which included philosophical enquiry as one of several components – revealed gains in cognitive functioning (verbal, nonverbal and quantitative reasoning) as well as subject learning – especially among disadvantaged young people (Mannion & Mercer, 2016).

What have I learned through experience?

Philosophical enquiry is absolutely my favourite thing to do as a teacher. It has been a central component of my practice for the last 7 years, and I still run weekly enquiry sessions at the Self Managed Learning College, where I currently work part-time.

Anecdotally – and I make no apology for this – I have seen first-hand how transformative this approach is in terms of helping students develop their confidence and find their voice. It provides young people with the opportunity to discuss and explore things that are just not up for discussion in any other part of the curriculum. Some of the most memorable enquiries have been on the following questions – always written and chosen by the children:

Are ghosts real?

Is anything inherently good or evil, or do humans make it so?

Could the world be a simulation?

Is religion a force for good in the world?

Do animals have language?

Is life a war between all the animals?

Are dreams real?

One thing that’s really interesting when you work with a group over a long period is to observe how group interactions become more sophisticated over time – how they learn to disagree with one another without being offensive (year 7s often start by saying “no offence, but…” before going on to say something offensive); how they learn to active listen to one another, rather than just waiting to say what’s in their head; how they build on the ideas of others and assimilate new speech patterns; how they learn to be more concise when making a point, or to bite their tongue altogether; how they learn to give reasons for their thinking without being prompted; how they learn to run a philosophical enquiry session with minimal input from me… it really is a joy to behold.

My favourite moments are when students change their minds about something within the space of a lesson, and sometimes within the space of a single sentence. I recall an incredible moment in a discussion on the morality of shoplifting when a year 7 boy – a lively character who expressed challenging behaviours at times – paused mid-sentence, started again, stopped again and then said “I both agree and disagree with myself”, before embarking on a fulsome explanation of his newly complex stance.

Interestingly, students often reported that through philosophy they felt more confident about standing up to bullies. I attribute this to them “finding their voice”, another common theme in their learning journals. This links to something that only recently occurred to me, in a discussion about philosophical enquiry.

The reason I think this approach is so powerful is that it opens up a space in which, whatever the topic of discussion, we are really fundamentally thinking about two fundamental questions: what is the nature of truth, and how should I live my life? Philosophical enquiry stirs young people from ‘passive consumption’ mode and enables them to learn from themselves and from one another. In so doing, the young people become both more fully themselves and more fully integrated into the world around them. These are not things that you can “just tell them”.

Finally, I’m pretty sure my adventures in teaching philosophical enquiry have made me a better parent. I frequently draw upon my experience and training conversations with my son that enable him to explore ideas from different perspectives, and me to view the world through fresh eyes. And that really is priceless.

If you’re interested in being trained in a flexible approach to running philosophical enquiry lessons, see below for details. We offer 4 free places to hosting schools.

Last Friday, Kate McAllister (my ace Learning to Learn co-pilot) and I ran our first ever proper training day, to share our story with schools and to help them start writing their own story. It was probably one of my favourite ever days working in education.

There was an incredible moment in the afternoon, when a delegate asked: “If you had to boil down your approach – what would you say is the essence of it?” Kate replied: “I can’t tell you that. You have to work it out for yourself.”

We explained that we find ourselves in a weird position. We want to spread these practices as far and wide as we possibly can, and yet when schools ask us “what is it?”, our response is to say: “Let’s sit down and figure out what it means for you”.

It should be a difficult sell, and yet on Friday we did just that. Here are some of the comments we received in the evaluation forms:

Thought provoking. Well organised. Helped me to distil my existing ideas, evaluate current position and begin to plan some possible routes forward in order to enhance learning of pupils at Key Stage 3.

Research-led INSET is rare and this session proves that it should be the norm. Enthusiasm of the presentation matched by the willing participation of the delegates.

Excellent opportunities to consider ways to develop our own programme. Also to share ideas with others.

V interesting content. I have been thinking hard today about the learners at our school and whole-school strategies that could facilitate ‘learning to learn’. My brain is whirling.

Thought provoking. Empowering – good balance of theory and application.

Feel inspired and empowered to move things forward in my school.

Great mix of activities – whole group, small group, individual.

The starting activity was an eye opener and showed some of the ideas that could be discussed. Great opportunity to think and consider.

Based on factual evidence that it works, but full of practical advice; many courses are full of concepts, but this had real ideas to take back and build on at my school.

The course has helped me gain / reinforced an overview of what we are trying to achieve in our L2L programme. It was also good to consider concepts and structures. Really enjoyed the basketball activity.

There was a lot of time spent on developing personal ideas / targets as well as time for discussion and sharing of ideas. The starter activity was great!

Very informative – good to speak / network with people implementing similar processes.

Probably the best INSET ever!

I think it’s fair to say, we are quite pleased with how it went. After 7 years chipping away at the marble, developing and evaluating the ‘Learning Skills’ approach, it’s super rewarding to begin the next chapter of our journey – working with other schools.

Ten courses: an invitation to schools…

We are looking for schools to host future training events. If you would like to host one at your school, you get 4 free places for you or your colleagues. Unless it’s a whole-staff training session, in which case we’ll offer you a reduced rate. We’re currently looking for venues for the Spring / Summer terms, so it’s first come first served!

Learning Skills: Raising the Bar, Closing the Gap(This is the course we ran last Friday)

Summary: Working with all staff to create a joined-up approach to whole-school teaching and learningDuration: Half day (3.5h) Audience: Teachers, learning support assistants, senior leaders Group size: All staff, plus student representatives

Learning through philosophical enquiry

Summary: A practical workshop on learning how to teach through philosophical enquiry Duration: 1 day Audience: Teachers, learning support assistants, senior leaders Group size: 15-25

Setting up an L2L curriculum

Summary: How to build a taught L2L curriculum that works for youDuration: 1 dayAudience: Senior leaders, heads of L2L, teachers of L2LGroup size: 15-20

Summary: An annual programme of professional development through small-scale research inquiryDuration: Annual programme (½ INSET day and 4-6 twilight sessions). We also run a 1.5 hour twilight to sell the idea to staff / SLT.Audience: All teaching staff, learning support assistants, senior leaders Group size: Min 4, max all teaching staff

We also offer bespoke packages of combinations of the above, depending on your needs – just drop us a line at james@rethinking-ed.org.

A year ago, I began working as a tutor at the Self Managed Learning College in Brighton. It’s an alternative education provider for young people aged 9-16 who, for various reasons, choose not to attend school. There are structures in place to support the students – community meetings, learning groups, learning agreements – but fundamentally, it does what it says on the tin: there are no lessons, and the students manage their own learning. It’s also a democratic community, so the students are very much involved in running the place – recruiting tutors, organising trips, resolving problems and so on.

As someone who is engaged in the education debate, it’s sometimes difficult to know where to begin explaining SMLC, so different is it to the mainstream model. I myself have gone through a process of deschooling my thinking throughout the last year – it takes time and effort to see SMLC for what it is, and what it is not. Perhaps the best “way in” is to listen to what students, and the founder, say about it – hence this post.

I recently interviewed Ian Cunningham, the founder of SMLC and the current chair of governors – the interview is below, in 10 sections. It’s quite long (over 2 hours in total) – if you’re a time-pressed teacher, I recommend jumping to Part 4. But if you’re interested in hearing what amounts to a fairly devastating critique of traditional schooling – and about a radical alternative to the mainstream model with a proven track record – I strongly recommend watching all the way through.

First, here’s a TED talk by a former student, describing how SMLC ‘saved his educational life from an abyss’.

An interview with Ian Cunningham, the founder of SMLC

Part 1

Q1: What was your experience of school?

Q2: So, you got a degree in Chemistry. Did you then work as a chemist?

Q3: When did you start to formalise your thinking around Self Managed Learning?

Q4: What was the undergraduate ‘School of Independent Study?’

Q5: How did you support students to become better learners?

Part 2

Q6: Where did the name ‘Self Managed Learning’ come from?

Q7: Where did the 5 questions come from?

Q8: What are the 5 questions?

Part 3

Q9: So the SML approach was developed in a University, but you then applied the approach in government, businesses…?

Q10: How did you explore the question of what makes someone effective?

Part 4

Q11: So having developed the SML approach in organisations, you then started to work with schools…?

Part 5

Q12: Can you expand on the 55 ways of learning?

Part 6

Q13: How and why did you establish the Self Managed Learning College?

Part 7

Q14: What is the structure of SMLC? Q15: How is SMLC funded, inspected etc?

Part 8

Q16: What is a typical day / week like at SMLC?

Part 9

Q17: What does the future hold for SMLC?

Q18: Why does the world need Self Managed Learning?

Part 10

Q19: What are ‘structures for freedom’, and how does this idea relate to the SML approach?

I wrote this back in March 2013 in an attempt to map current and historical discourses around education, and to question why some things just don’t seem to be up for discussion any more.

—————–

“The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.”

(HL Mencken, 1924)

During the last two or three years, I have spent an unusual amount of time reading blogs written by teachers. There is certainly no shortage to choose from, and I am often pleasantly surprised by how well written they are. And so to the edubloggers of planet earth, to paraphrase what Stephen Fry once wrote of Douglas Adams: your ability to put one word after another in the service of awakening, delighting, bamboozling, informing or amusing the minds of your readers never fails to amaze me.

In particular, I find it incredible how much time and energy teachers are willing to invest in this emerging extracurricular activity. I feel it is testament to the commitment teachers typically feel toward their vocation of choice – that in spite of the already questionable work/life balance that characterises our profession, we are prepared to sit tapping away at our keyboards at unsociable hours, chipping away at the marble in the hope that one day, our individual and collaborative efforts might just have shaped something more worthy of our gaze.

The vast majority of the blogs teachers write adopt an optimistic tone, and I think it is fair to say that the majority of posts could be described as sharing good practice, or seeking to establish “what good looks like”. No-one gets paid for blogging – we do it because we want to learn, share and connect with one another. This is a wonderful thing indeed. Through social media and a dizzying array of grassroots gatherings, teachers are coming together in unprecedented numbers to share resources and ideas, to meet and question education researchers and to challenge one another to see things from different perspectives. Through this, I have a strong sense that a new professional identity is being forged – one that is more robust, and more sure-footed, than ever before.

To me, the underlying message that emerges from all this activity is that teachers know infinitely more about “what good looks like” than the people who call the shots, and to whose tune we all dance daily. It must only be a matter of time until the burden of governance is transferred to safer hands.

In the mean-time, I would like to explore three questions:

Where lie the boundaries of current discourses around education?

How does this differ from educational discourses throughout history?

What paths in the current discourse are well-worn – and are there areas where we no longer dare tread?

To take the last of these first: This is not the most scientific thing I’ve ever done, but here’s a ‘word cloud’ of topics that have been up for discussion in recent months, on some of the most widely read teacher blogs:

The ideas that define our professional lives

Take a good look at this word cloud. What do you notice? These are the components of currently accepted and acceptable discourse around education. The boundaries of this discourse are regulated and reinforced daily – by political parties and their favoured think tanks, by journalists and newspaper editors, by institutions such as Ofsted and Ofqual, by education consultants and advisors, by school governors and academy sponsors, by academics who are themselves regulated by strict assessment and funding criteria – and increasingly, by teachers themselves. Everyone except students, basically. Not that I’m suggesting students should be running the show – but their contribution to these wider discourses is notable by its absence nonetheless.

I wrote recently that Twitter makes me raise my game every day – that I hear a multitude of critical voices now when I teach, or plan, or give feedback. While this may sound disturbing, I consider it to be a rather healthy state of affairs. So, I would like to emphasise that what follows is not intended in any way to diminish the Herculean efforts of my fellow teacher bloggers.

Here comes the ‘but’

The scope of current discourses around education appears to be broadly limited to sharing good practice, within the institutions and organisational structures of the system that generally pre-date our entry into the profession. These discourses take place within a set of assumptions about our education system which – as far as I can discern – have gone largely unexamined since the 1970s, when people like Jerome Bruner, Richard Peters, John Holt, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner, Paulo Freire, John Garnder, Jurgen Habermas, AS Neill, Ivan Illich and Pierre Bourdieu were doing the rounds. (I realise how male this list is, by the way. Is this my bias, or a 1970s one?) Now the names I read about most frequently are John Hattie and Doug Lemov – more technicians of “what works”, than rattlers of the cage.

Now, I was only born in 1976, and I did not engage much in educational debate as a toddler. It might well be the case that in the late 70s, everybody collectively decided that Deschooling Society is a terrible idea and agreed to get on board with the programme. Maybe that meeting did happen, and it passed me entirely by as I sat watching cowboy films, slurping bowls of cereal. But I have not yet been presented with any evidence to suggest that this is the case, whereas I am fairly convinced that many of the issues authors like these were writing about 40 years ago, are just as relevant today as they were then – if not more so.

What concerns me is this: the rich seam of educational discourses that question or challenge the status quo, which can be traced throughout history from Rousseau through people like John Dewey and Carl Rogers to those listed above – this centuries-long flow of critically engaged intellectual thought appears to have all but run dry. Have the concerns of these authors – about how education happens despite schooling, not because of it; about how compulsory schooling serves to perpetuate and even deepen social divides, as well as perpetuating existing power structures; about whether Mencken might not have been wearing a tin foil hat when he wrote the quote at the top of this article – have these concerns really gone away? And despite the noble intentions that have driven the recent explosion in teacher blogs, by spending our precious free time writing about “what works” within regulated discourses prescribed by establishment institutions, without ever pausing to question the long-forgotten assumptions that underpin them – are teacher bloggers too merely rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic?

Such assumptions can take many forms, but my identification with them generally stems from naturalistic observations of behaviours that significant numbers of young people display, especially in secondary schools: the apathy and the learned helplessness; the all-pervading desire to be cool or popular, or to conform to expressions of boredom or disinterest; the staggering levels of bullying; the betrayals of former close friends; the wilful disruption of lessons, from the gentlest tapping of a pen to sudden explosions of anger or aggression; the ‘boffin-baiting’; the endless attention-seeking; the creation of melodrama as entertainment; the mental health issues; the increased prevalence of smoking, drinking and drug use schoolchildren.

This list makes for uncomfortable reading, and I have no desire to dwell on the negative aspects of schools which are, simultaneously, incredibly rewarding and life-affirming places in which to work. But it is a list that anyone who works with young people will recognise. These issues do not present themselves constantly in schools. But they are there, every day, in every lesson, bubbling away beneath the surface, quietly undermining everything the system ostensibly sets out to do. I am not suggesting that these issues are caused directly by the education system. I am simply asking – are we really sure that there is nothing else to be done, beyond spreading good practice in the domains outlined in the word cloud above?

The unquestioned assumptions that underpin current educational discourses are many and varied. In no particular order, here are a few:

The best age to get people to sit state-funded, high stakes compulsory examinations, is 14-16;

Compulsory schooling to age 16 should be insisted upon for all young people;

Raising the age of participation is a good idea;

We should restrict the number of subjects students study as they progress through the system;

All students should attend an assembly at least once each week, regardless of whether there is anything important that needs to be communicated in this way;

Primary and secondary schools should continue to be separate;

Secondary schools are a good size;

Adults should not be able to enrol in classes that run in the daytime;

Maths, English and Science should continue to be compulsory;

Exams are a good way to measure educational success, ‘student learning’ or ‘student outcomes’;

Schools need to exist as physical buildings that people attend every day;

Teachers can reliably attribute a numerical value to a student’s ‘attitude to learning’;

We should educate children in batches according to chronological age;

‘Stage not age’ is organisationally impossible;

Classrooms should continue to exist in their current form;

It is a good idea to study 8 or 10 subjects simultaneously – in fact, we should never deviate from this model;

The school day should be divided into roughly 5 one-hour slots;

We should encourage higher ability students to pursue academic courses, and lower ability students to pursue vocational courses;

Some students need to fail exams in order for others to pass;

It makes sense to speak of a single ‘education system’, rather than ‘systems’;

Teachers should only be allowed to teach certain subjects;

Learning should be based around subject disciplines;

Students’ abilities can reliably be represented as an alphanumeric code, or a number on a scale;

School uniform is a good idea – especially when it resembles grey suits;

Labelling young people with various Special Educational Needs is in their best interests;

If you work hard in school you will get a good job and earn more money. This will make you happy.

In short: our classrooms and corridors are occupied by an army of elephants so vast, it is surprising we are able to breathe.

If there is one thing almost everyone agrees on, it’s the diagnosis that “all is not well” in the state of education. People get attached to different ideas as to how to treat the symptoms: we need more effective CPD; or whole-school behaviour policies; or to promote a ‘growth mindset’; or to interleave the curriculum and testing regime; or to promote imaginative enquiry; or to do battle with Ofsted; or to become ‘research literate’. I do not doubt that there may be value in each of these things. But should we not perhaps also be asking more fundamental questions as well?

Here’s one:

If you could design an education system from the ground up – to what extent would it resemble the one we have?

The notion that you need to know stuff in order to think or speak about it convincingly has been hailed from the rooftops in recent years like it offers some great insight. This seems strange because it is so obvious. This so-called ‘neo-traditional’ concern for subject knowledge seems to be born of a frustration with a national curriculum that has been overly concerned with skills, twinned with insights from cognitive scientists like Daniel Willingham that, well, you need to know stuff in order to think or speak about it convincingly.

I must say I welcome the development, albeit for slightly different reasons than those often given by neo-trads. As a Science teacher of 10 years I think it is fair to say that in my subject at least, knowledge has been… not under-represented, so much as misconceived. I don’t think this is because there has been too much emphasis on skills, because the actual skills scientists use are under-represented as well. (Not to mention, bizarrely distorted: I have worked in neuroscience research labs at UCL and Harvard Medical School, and I never once heard anyone say “Hang on a minute guys… what’s the independent variable here?” I have also attended many medical conferences; not once have I seen a medic raise their hand and say “Thanks for your talk, it was fascinating but there’s one thing I’m not clear on: did you list your equipment?”)

Rather, my concern is that the knowledge base in Science is so broad – and therefore so shallow. The outgoing Triple Science GCSE, being sat for the last time this year, is like a vast ocean of knowledge that’s about half an inch deep. There’s a mind-boggling amount to cover but there’s no depth to any of it, and barely a whiff of what is by far and away the most fascinating aspect of Science – the incredible human stories behind how we came to know all this stuff. Bill Bryson grasped this when he wrote A Short History of Nearly Everything, as does Michael Brooks in the equally excellent Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science. If only these guys wrote the GCSE specification.

To master this Pacific-sized puddle may make for a gruelling exam, but it provides a flimsy foundation for authentic scientific thinking and reasoning. So to clarify: I am not defending the status quo. If I had my way I would cover fewer topics in far greater depth. I would also introduce essays, to enable and encourage scientific thinking to go beyond the current upper limit: the point-scoring exercise of the 6-mark question.

So far so Tiger, you might think. Why, I’m asking for a greater depth of knowledge for goodness sake. So where do I part ways with my stripy feline friends? Well, as Neil Mercer explains in his chapter of the excellent ‘Speaking Frankly’ publication (recommended reading, free to download here): “Learning to become a scientist… obviously requires both content knowledge and the development of critical thinking skills.” Having read quite a bit from Tiger types on the role of subject knowledge, I think they tend to place too much emphasis on the former and too little on the latter. Allow me to explain.

Neo-trads frequently quote from Daniel Willingham’s excellent book Why don’t children like school? However, they tend to read it quite selectively. In particular, they are strongly influenced by passages like this one:

“Trying to teach students skills such as analysis or synthesis in the absence of factual knowledge is impossible. Research from cognitive science has shown that the sorts of skills teachers want for their students – such as the ability to analyse and to think critically – require extensive factual knowledge. The cognitive principle that guides this chapter is: ‘Factual knowledge must precede skill’.”

Because of statements like these, we have seen the phenomenon in recent years of teachers waking up from their blob-induced slumber like a scene from a science fiction movie, taking to the rooftops and declaring aloud “I was lost but now I am found! For all these years we’ve been teaching skills, when what we really need to do is teach knowledge! Let’s strip away everything and just drill knowledge! JUST TELL THEM! JOIN THE REVOLUTION! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS!” (These last 3 are direct Tiger Teacher quotes, by the way).

It is difficult to know the extent to which schools like Michaela “just drill knowledge” – this is not really something a visit to the school would solve, unless you stayed for several weeks – and so we have to go off what Tiger Teachers write. For example Joe Kirby, a Deputy Head at Michaela, wrote recently: “We use drills a lot at Michaela. Every lesson, six lessons a day, multiple times per lesson, learning at Michaela is an unrelenting regime of deliberately designed, subject-specific practice drills.” Perhaps I am misinterpreting this in some way, but here Joe does make it sound like drilling knowledge is pretty much the beginning and end of everything at his school. It is difficult to see where critical thinking skills could be developed in a timetable where every lesson is riddled with drill, because pretty much by definition you can’t develop critical thinking through drill.

Drilling knowledge has its place, and Willingham makes a good case for it in his book. But if you read what he says a bit more closely, you find that this is only half the story. Even if it is true that factual knowledge precedes critical thinking skills (it really is), this does not mean that drilling factual knowledge is sufficient to develop critical thinking skills (it really isn’t). Drilling knowledge for 6 lessons a day does not mean that students will automatically develop critical thinking skills in the way that Neo learned Kung Fu in the Matrix.

Here are some more quotes from the same Willingham chapter (emphases added):

“The implication is that facts must be taught, ideally in the context of skills“

“We want our students to think, not simply to memorise. When someone shows evidence of thinking critically, we consider her smart and well-educated. When someone spouts facts without context, we consider her boring and a show-off.”

“The conclusion from this work in cognitive science is straightforward: we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge in parallel with practicing critical thinking skills.”

“In this chapter I describe how cognitive scientists know that thinking skills and knowledge are bound together.”

“Our goal is not simply to have student know a lot of stuff-it’s to have them know stuff in service of being able to think effectively.”

Willingham even offers a quote from JD Everett, written in 1873:

“There is a great danger in the present day lest science-teaching should degenerate into the accumulation of disconnected facts and unexplained formulae, which burden the memory without cultivating the understanding.”

To reiterate, because this is important: knowledge is necessary for critical thinking, but it is not sufficient. It is abundantly clear that Willingham’s central message is one of balance, and he sums up the twin insights of cognitive science succinctly:

“It is certainly true that facts without the skills to use them are of little value. It is equally true that one cannot deploy thinking skills effectively without factual knowledge.”

He really couldn’t make it any clearer: knowledge is important, but please don’t rush off and create a school where knowledge is drilled didactically for 6 lessons a day… oh wait.

To explain the subtitle of this blog, borrowed from TV’s The Thick of It – I am currently in training for the Brighton marathon. Think of my goal – to complete the marathon in a respectable time – as a metaphor for writing a brilliant (if overly long) essay which showcases my critical thinking skills. As I increase my weekly mileage, I need to increase my intake of slow-release carbs accordingly. If all I do is eat porridge, I’ll just get fat; I’d get a stitch after half a mile. To run really well I need to combine eating lots of porridge with a detailed training regime; combining long runs with tempo bursts to increase my aerobic threshold; using technology like running machines and apps; reading about race tactics, sports psychology; and so on.

In becoming a scientist, as well as learning content knowledge you also need to understand how scientists collect and use evidence; how to design experiments so they’re resistant to experimenter bias; how to synthesise different strands of evidence into an argument or theory; how to pick holes in a method; how to spot when someone is cherry-picking data; how to question and determine the reliability of a source; how to systematically identify the source of data that doesn’t fit the pattern (shockingly, in GCSE science the advice with regard to anomalies is simply to ignore them – this is actually a question that regularly appears on the exam!); how to spot logical fallacies and rhetorical sleights of hand in the flow of a verbally fluent speaker… to name but a few.

To help students get better at critical thinking is not some woolly-minded progressive tree-hugging exercise. It is something you can achieve with traditional means also – modelling, explaining, deconstructing, providing opportunities for practice, scaffolding, withdrawing support, providing and acting on feedback, drafting and redrafting. It also benefits hugely from the judicious use of group work and paired work, as well as working independently or at the whole-class level. Progressive ends through traditional means, you might say.

Some people seem to suggest that critical thinking skills can’t be taught, For example, on Sunday Michael Fordham, a vocal advocate of subject knowledge, tweeted “Bailin et al took a lot of the critical thinking bandwagon apart in the late 1990s”, and provided a link to a paper entitled ‘Common misconceptions of critical thinking’. This was a response to my suggestion that knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for the development of critical thinking skills, and I assume that Michael intended this as proof that I was barking up the wrong tree, and that critical thinking can’t be taught. However in this article, which is well worth a read, the authors conclude that:

“a variety of means may be employed to promote [the development of critical thinking skills], including direct instruction, teacher modelling, creation of an educational environment where critical inquiry is valued and nurtured, and provision for students of frequent opportunities to think critically about meaningful common misconceptions of critical thinking challenges with appropriate feedback. Practice may also have a role to play, but it must be understood that it is not practice in the sense of a simple repetition of a skill, process or procedure. Rather such practice presupposes the kind of knowledge outlined above, and involves the development of critical judgement through applying this knowledge in a variety of contexts. It also involves attempts on the part of the learner to improve according to specific criteria of performance, and frequent feedback and evaluation with respect to the quality of thinking demonstrated.” (emphasis added)

I don’t think these is anything to argue with here. If we can accept that schools should seek to develop both subject knowledge and critical thinking skills – ideally embedded within the same scheme of work, and developed sequentially – shouldn’t we seek to do both? I have no doubt whatsoever that if schools like Michaela grasped the nettle and concerned themselves with finding ways to teach and develop critical thinking skills really well, I’m sure they would generate a lot good practice worth sharing. I hope it is not too long before they lift their gaze from relentless knowledge drills, re-read Willingham and accept that there is more to running a marathon than eating porridge.

If you want to find out about a whole-school approach to teaching and learning that is almost the polar opposite to Tiger Teaching – an approach rooted in research evidence, which has been found to lead to significantly improved academic attainment and a closing of the Pupil Premium gap from the bottom up – we are running a training event at Streatham and Clapham High School on January 27th. A Curriculum Journal article outlining the approach and its impact is available here. Tickets are available here. Tiger teachers welcome.

I had an illuminating exchange on Twitter the other evening with Katharine Birbalsingh, the head of Michaela School. It began because I was intrigued by a phrase she had used in the “heightened” part of her talk at the book launch for ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers’, which you can see here. Here’s the exchange:

Me: Hi Katharine. I enjoyed your speech, but may I ask – what did you mean by “we will lose our country”?

KB: If our children never learn to behave and consequently cannot learn at all, we are doomed.

Me: Oh so it was more a figure of speech, rather than a specific point? It’s just you mentioned country in your blog as well…?

KB: The future of any country is its children. If we destroy ours, we will lose our country. Not more specific than that.

Me: I don’t mean to split hairs, but it is quite an unusual turn of phrase. Lose it to whom?

KB: You know how you can talk about ‘losing’ a class? You lose control of it, you can never get them back on track again. You lose the class or the country to the dark side…

At this point @LeoToAquarius chimed in with “lose to the oligarchy. We’re in-between a Democracy & a Republic = needs an educated population” and linked to a video called Types of government, explained; if you haven’t seen this before, it is well worth 10 minutes of your time.

Regardless of whether you think it is possible to get a class back once you have lost control (it is), the reason I think this exchange was illuminating is that while we may disagree on the means, fundamentally Katharine, Leo and I share an answer to the ultimate question “what is education for?”

I did not decide to become a teacher because I woke up one day with a burning desire to to turn D grades to C grades, or As to A*s, although obviously it is good if you can do this along the way. I became a teacher because following years of contemplation, I came to the conclusion that education is humanity’s best bet for building a brighter future. If you really want to change the world, be a positive role model for as many kids as you can and if you can – change the way education is done to make it work for everyone. Some people dispute this notion and say that if a teacher thinks their job is social engineer, they need to wind their neck in. But education has to be about more than a concern for your country’s PISA ranking. For good and for ill, education shapes lives and it is therefore fiercely political. It always has been, it always will be, and it always should be.

I too want a future where we do not “lose” our country in the same way an inexperienced teacher might “lose” a class. Because it won’t be an amiable assistant head who steps in to the power vacuum to restore order. I too want to prevent an unwitting, uninformed slide to oligarchy. As HG Wells once memorably put it, civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe. I get that. The question, as ever, is how best to achieve this.

The teachers at Michaela School have undoubtedly made a number of valuable contributions to the education debate – especially around teacher workload, for example. However, like Debra Kidd I also have a number of serious concerns about aspects of what they do.

It seems to me that if our aim is to create the kind of informed population that is able to prevent an unwitting slide to oligarchy in an age of fake news and post-truth politics, we need to educate young people so that they are not only knowledgeable, but also questioning and appropriately critical of those in authority. We need a population that is independent, informed, verbally confident, politically literate and politically engaged, self-regulating, organised, adaptive and disruptive where disruption is needed.

I have not yet visited Michaela (pitchforks at the ready), but I don’t need to visit to know that they insist on silent corridors for example, with utterances presumably punishable by detention. I don’t need to visit to take the view that this is unhealthily controlling – even if the students tell you they love it. (What would happen to a student who speaks out against the regime to a visitor?)

I presume that the main reason for silent corridors is a concern for the students’ safety. Katie Ashford here describes non-Michaela school corridors as “chaotic, violent, and out of control”, which is not a picture I recognise having worked in state schools for the last 10 years. (In describing a child magically transported to a Michaela corridor, she also writes “you remember the corridors and the fear and the dread and the loathing and the horror, and the words of the naysayers do nothing to perturb you or shake your faith in the environment you have helped to build.” I’m pretty sure I could eke out a PhD doing discourse analysis on this sentence.)

Look at any bunch of people in the street. They’ll likely be talking. Talking is what we do. Talking is what makes us human. You don’t want there to be bullying in corridors, and there are good ways to minimise this. There are also good ways of dealing with bullying when it does happen, and this too can be a valuable learning experience. But bullying is a fact of life, as any teacher who uses Twitter will attest. Should schools seek to suppress any independent talking among students altogether, sacrificed at the altar of no bullying? Is this really the direction we want to head in as a society?

If you have ever been bullied, as I was at school, you might think “Yes! Bullying is horrible and we should do everything in our power to stamp it out entirely – whatever it takes.” If this is your view, it’s perfectly understandable – however you also have to accept the consequences of this decision as well. As well as promoting knowledge, a school that insists on silent corridors (as just one of a raft of unusually controlling measures regarding types of pen, types of bag, how to use a chair, when to fold your arms, where to direct your eyes etc) also strongly promotes compliance and conformity.

Is this the best way to create the kind of informed population that is able to prevent an unwitting slide to oligarchy in an age of fake news and post-truth politics? Is this the way to educate young people so that they are not only knowledgeable, but also questioning and appropriately critical of those in authority? Is this the way to produce a population that is independent, informed, verbally confident, politically literate and politically engaged, self-regulating, organised, adaptive, disruptive where disruption is needed?

Of course I recognise the need for teachers to be strict at times. The golden rule of behaviour management is that you don’t let anything slide – ever. But strictness is not the only way to “not let things slide”, and it’s not always the best way. It should certainly not be the only tool in your box. When it comes to strictness, as ever Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean is apposite – the desirable middle way between excess and deficiency. Good behaviour management also involves being authentic, and listening to your students. It sometimes requires you to make exceptions, rather than excuses. More than anything, it involves good relationships. Of course you need whole-school systems that support NQTs to teach as well as their more experienced colleagues. But as a former colleague once said – an inspirational classroom practitioner who had the students wrapped around his little finger – you win the behaviour battle in the corridor. Not by insisting on silence, but by talking to students – showing an interest in their lives, establishing common ground, making them laugh, making them think. Being a role model. Making them feel understood. Making them want to be in your lesson.

If you want to find out about a whole-school approach to teaching and learning that is almost the polar opposite to Tiger Teaching – an approach rooted in research evidence, which has been found to lead to significantly improved academic attainment and a closing of the Pupil Premium gap from the bottom up – we are running a training event at Streatham and Clapham High School on January 27th. A Curriculum Journal article outlining the approach and its impact is available here. Tickets are available here. Tiger teachers welcome.

I wrote Greg a fairly comprehensive reply, but he didn’t get back and so I thought I would share it here.

Hi Greg. You are quite correct, they are related and Guy’s version did indeed come first, although we actually adapted ours from another school. Guy and I discussed it when we met for a beer one evening. I would be happy to explain how and why we developed this language of learning, why we chose to present it in this way and how our students found it to be useful if you like.

The academy chain we were a part of had 6 attributes that it wanted its students to aspire to – the 6 large words on the brain diagram. But these words are far too broad to be helpful – “we are going to use teamwork in this lesson” is so broad as to be meaningless. What we wanted was to develop a language of learning that enabled pupils to drill down through these broad attributes to focus on specific learning behaviours that they could practice and improve at.

I know people like you refute the notion of generalisable thinking skills, but these are ‘doing’ skills which are absolutely transferrable: managing distractions, public speaking, argumentation, engaging in exploratory talk, organisational skills, learning how to memorise stuff – the minutiae of being an effective human being. All of this is rooted in 3 key ideas: metacognition, self-regulation and oracy.

As you know, as a general rule skills tend to remain rooted in the context in which they are developed, and they do not automatically transfer to other contexts. However, this does not mean transfer is a hopeless cause. It just has to be carefully managed, at both ends of the process – in our case, transfer out from L2L lessons, and transfer in to other subject areas. Have you read the paper Neil Mercer and I wrote about this study? There’s an explanation of the brain diagram on page 13 of this version, but it should really be viewed in the context of the entire paper, and certainly within the context of the lengthy discussion of transfer that surrounds it (pages 10 to 14).

It is also worth noting the outcomes of the study. After 3 years (in which the L2L cohort participated in more than 400 lessons of L2L), compared with the pre-L2L cohort there was around a 10%increase in the proportion of pupils hitting or exceeding target. A fairly modest improvement. But among Pupil Premium students, the improvement was 20%. By the end of year 9, the Pupil Premium gap in the pre-L2L cohort was 25%. In the L2L cohort, the gap was just 2%. The gap closed, from the bottom up.

Furthermore when L2L cohort 1 reached year 11, they achieved the best set of results in the school’s history by some margin, and the school saw by far the greatest reduction in Pupil Premium gap of any school in the city – in a year when the PP gap increased across the city as a whole. So you can call our brain diagram ‘spurious’ if you like, but I am incredibly proud of the role I played in these students’ education and I am strongly persuaded of the novel contribution our study can make to the education debate more widely – not least, with respect to the notion of complex interventions.

To return to the language of learning, I see it as essentially pre-teaching the vocab. If you want students to learn about electricity, you might provide them with a set of key words we use to describe and explain electricity – voltage, current, resistance et al – that they can refer back to as and when the need arises. Likewise, if you want students to get better at learning, they need to develop the vocab we use to describe how learning happens, how *they* learn in different contexts – and how they might get even better at learning. As they start to use, assimilate and internalise this language, they begin to develop a stronger identity of themselves as learners.

For what it’s worth, if I had my time again I’d probably use the glossary of 225 learning terms I published recently. Although I’d probably try to find a nice visual way to present it… Come to think of it, your heuristic hippo is kind of neat. I’ll be sure to reference you.

Posts navigation

“Probably the best INSET ever!” (Sarah R, 2017)

We provide evidence-informed education training and workshops for primary, secondary, further and higher education providers. We can also help evaluate the impact of what you already do. To find out how we can help your organisation become a beacon of evidence-informed practice...